The article does not mention cow milk's health implications, and only focuses on debunking Oatly's alleged health benefits. This creates the same "Obscure the Truth" effect the article opens with, giving the impression that there's nothing wrong with cow milk.
If both options are equally unhealthy (which is at the minimum the biased impression the article gives by not discussing cow milk), at the minimum the moral one should be chosen.
Yeah, and one shouldn't ignore the economic and environmental drawbacks of milk – in the US, at least, the government subsidises milk production heavily so it's profitable for the farmers. And dairy milk is terrible for the environment: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46654042
The HFCS in every milk substitute that sells is the ultimate subsidy crop. Soy and rice are as well. Dairy isn’t profitable for farmers and is rapidly declining as beverage giants and more politically powerful agriculture interests push their policy goals.
The environmental arguments aren’t very convincing to me. I grew up in an agricultural area where dairy was king and there was a diversified crop economy. Now it’s corn+fertilizer. Carbon impact may be lower, but the impact on the environment is more than carbon. Water depletion in the Midwest, pollution from runoff and over utilization and other factors matter too.
I don’t really see how water depletion is a relevant issue when most cows are being fed grain and soy.
Vegans probably ignore the harms of monoculture in their arguments. But a lot of meat eaters like to point to studies of how cattle and sheep can graze on land that can’t support other agriculture. Sure, but what % of cattle are actually raised that way? How much does a burger or gallon of milk cost when it’s grass fed.
I also imagine drinking diluted cows pregnancy and chronic inflammation hormones with extra cortisol on top from all the stress they experience because of their living conditions can’t be beneficial for you as well.
I asked my vegan friends if they’d rather these animals would not exist at all rather than be used for milk production (because they are only bred into existence for that).
I wonder how that logic applies to humans born into living in rough countries, would vegans rather they would not exist at all?
It’s not like a dairy cow has a life of eternal suffering after all. It eats, grazes, rests and socializes. It does cow things.
Dairy cows exist because we actively breed them. We inject dairy cows with sperm to keep them pregnant so they keep producing milk, then take their calf away and repeat the process. They're not multiplying on their own.
That’s exactly my point. With no utility, these animals would not exist. Are their lives so miserable that we can morally assert that they should not be living?
I suggest you look up "factory farming" before making claims like "It’s not like a dairy cow has a life of eternal suffering after all". They literally don't do any of the activities you mention.
I know dairy farming very, very well. It varies between areas. In France for example, there are no mega farms, all farms are small to medium, many family owned. Hormones are banned. This is true for other parts of Western Europe.
Mega Farms are mostly an American issue. I do not support them at all.
I'd recommend some more research into the how cows in dairy farms are treated. Your description is rather more idyllic than the reality, I think. For one, most male calves are not needed on a dairy farm, so they are either slaughtered for veal, raised as beef cattle, or euthanized at birth [1]. Whether this matter to you depends on where you stand on vegetarianism of course, and anyway the issues with the wellfare of meat herds is not what I wanted to discuss.
The dairy cows are also not quite so happy, I think. Mastitis is a potentially fatal disease of the udder, usually caused by bacteria entering the teat; many of the practices on a dairy farm make this far more likely, and while of course the farmers are doing all they can to stop it, it is still one of the biggest issues in the industry, and it seems that some level of mastitis is expected in all dairy herds [2]. It is perhaps a side note to the animal wellfare aspect, but the use of antibiotics is a big part of the mitigations, and seems to be administered as a matter of course; this is an issue because it promotes antibiotic resistance in bacteria, which has implications for humans too.
There are other wellfare issues around overwork of cows from producing much larger amounts of milk than they would to feed a calf, whether grains are a healthy food compared to grasses, and even mental health issues such as separating cows from their calves and whether they have enough access to the outdoors.
I've tried to select links that are balanced and non-hyperbolic, but it's tricky to do. Like I said, I recommend more research but try not to be too turned off the hyperbolic articles on both sides. Articles from vegans are often under-researched and manipulative, but if you dig around you'll find that many of the issues they discuss are real. On the other hand, farmers are of course not animal hating devils and so write to defend themselves and their livelihood, but they can often go the other way and underplay the issues that are there.
And finally, animal wellfare is not the only argument for veganism, because livestock has an environmental impact comparable to the transport industry [3].
> The article does not mention cow milk's health implications, and only focuses on debunking Oatly's alleged health benefits
The article links to an entire other article discussing cow milk's health implications.
> If both options are equally unhealthy (which is at the minimum the biased impression the article gives by not discussing cow milk), at the minimum the moral one should be chosen.
Cow's milk and oat milk aren't the only two alternatives, though. Milk substitutes abound, some of them having much better health and moral implications (and as discussed in this thread, milk substitutes can be made at home).
I think almond milk tastes awful, Oatly was the first milk substitute I actually liked (maybe preferred!) to dairy milk.
Currently I rotate through Oatly, Califa farms, and Silk oat milks depending on what's available.
The water footprint of almond milk is just mind-blowing. I can't fathom ripping out other productive agriculture so that we can suck up more water than other crops just to sell almonds overseas and turn it into.. milk.
Soy milk is just as reasonable environmentally and probably a little healthier as a nutrition source compared to oat milk. Though the flavor of soy is a little harder to get used to.
I think unsweetened almond milk is maybe the best overall pick if you want a milk substitute. From my understanding it's fairly healthy, natural, and the taste / "mouth feel" is good. Downsides are cost and maybe the amount of water/bees used to make the almonds.
I'm also a fan of almond milk from a taste perspective, but I've always been a bit unsure about how it is processed – and the amount of water used is definitely an ethical downside in my book (I used to live in California, where this was a controversy during times of drought).
After a bit of research just now, though, there don't seem to be many credible claims of commercial Almond Milk's chemical processing being very scary (at least compared to Oatly, which also has a few additives) so that doesn't seem too problematic to me.
This article discusses the environmental impact of various milk alternatives:
> Greenhouse gas emissions: a 200ml glass of oat milk is responsible for around 0.18kg of CO2e. That’s slightly more than almond milk, but less than soy or cow’s milk.
> Swedish oat milk producer Oatly put the greenhouse gas emissions of a litre of their oat milk at 0.34kg, which is a lot less than the general estimate above of 0.18kg per 200ml
> Water: a litre of oat milk needs about 48 litres of water produce. In terms of water, then, oat milk is much lower impact than other milks.
The takeaway for me is that I might prefer oat milk to almond milk for "health/eco impact" reasons by a very narrow margin, but would strongly prefer either to cow's milk for those reasons.
100ml == ~3.4oz, so that's probably still a pretty equivalent amount of sugar to oatly. Either way, they're pretty negligible – most juices have at least 20g sugar in a cup.
Are you referring to the normal Oatly or the Barista version? Because the normal one doesn't work for coffee, but the latter is the best coffee milk I've had. I used to use real cream but actually now prefer that Oatly, it's that good.
> But fails to mention the the moral reasons to choose oat milk over cow's milk.
This is kind a red herring. Cow's milk should be irrelevant because you don't have to choose between the two. You can leave both out if you have moral reasons to avoid cow's milk and health reasons to avoid oat milk.
The author compares them to each other, so it makes sense to talk about why you should take it out of the picture.
As it happens, though, unsweetened almond milk does seem to have much less sugar – 0.2g by one measure I found (another just says 2g carbs of which 1g is fiber) and a glycemic index of 25 (low).
So it is a bit surprising that the author didn't make this comparison – it's much more favorable to his point.
Moral and environmental. Milk is one level up from eating vegetables. Some milk consumption is probably sustainable, but we can't feed the entire world on quark cheese.
We can feed the entire world on bugs. Are you prepared to eat bugs on a daily basis? I possibly would, occasionally, but maybe I'd like them cooked with a bit of butter, which is made out of cows milk.
The article does not mention cow milk's health implications, and only focuses on debunking Oatly's alleged health benefits. This creates the same "Obscure the Truth" effect the article opens with, giving the impression that there's nothing wrong with cow milk.
If both options are equally unhealthy (which is at the minimum the biased impression the article gives by not discussing cow milk), at the minimum the moral one should be chosen.